@James.Stark.Ben.Edition

3 months ago

1:07:00 love that framing, actually 1:15:00 actually you can repair or gloo up an elevator shaft next to the fabricator/recycler and just leave without fighting any of them. 1:46:55 also what's so interesting about the Dahl choice to me is its basically asking if you're willing to be Alex. it's asking if you're willing to do to someone what Alex did to you with the neuromod wipes because you deem it's for the greater good of saving people. it's essentially asking you if you'd gaslight someone on the potential of saving human lives. and does them being an enemy make it easier for you? like of the game's 5 endings (you either destroy and escape, you destroy and don't escape, you set off the nullwave and escape, you set off the nullwave and don't escape, Alex's secret ending), all the 4 real ones tell Alex the same thing (see: the next paragraph). the Dahl choice is also a reflection of the story (just like the Fake Chef story is a reflection of the actual story) that's asking you questions about itself and what you're willing to do. 2:00:12 I mean, it's partly there for role-playing purposes but also, it's giving you the ability to judge people one last time, and finally decide how you feel about Alex at the end of it. this is because of the clever way and deeply unscientific way that Alex has set up the simulation in the first place. the reason the fake escape pod is not a legitimate choice is not because it's just a funny haha ending, it's because Alex won't allow the typhon that he's experimenting on to have an out from the experiment, it's inherently unscientific, the only option for you to get to the ending is to let Alex win one way or another. if you kill every human, it's telling Alex that you're willing to do whatever it takes and that you're capable of following orders, especially ones you deem as saving people (also love how Dahl actually praises you for doing his job for him if you're killing everyone). if you don't kill everybody, it's telling Alex that you're willing to do what it takes for science and helping people advance to a better society. the first option tells Alex that you care about people on a larger scale and you're willing to sacrifice the few for the many, the second option tells Alex that you care about people on a more intimate scale and think about the future and won't let humans die whenever you can save them. either way, Alex wins. because the only way to get to the ending is by making sure Alex's experiment is successful. that's why the characters at the end tell you that your motivation for doing something are impossible to judge because no matter why you did something, Alex wins either way and he gets what he wants either way, it gives you a moral quandary at the end to decide how you feel about Alex and decide if everything that he did was justified. the whole reason humanity was doomed in the first place was because people like Alex wanted to play god and transcend their place in the world and he is just doing that again by experimenting on typhon again. he is just repeating the same thing in a different way hoping for a different result. you get to decide if his experiment worked or not. you decide if humanity survives, even if there's some bad people in it like Alex. that's why there's the question about the fat man in the opening quiz, the fat man is Alex. the simulation that Alex designed is asking you if you will kill him to save humanity. no matter which way you feel about the trolley problem, the game presents it to you one last time as a culmination of its themes. i can see why some people don't like it because it's a little too gamified but the whole game is a self-reflexive statement on the nature of games (and all fiction at large) and how seriously we take them even though we know they're fake. like a lot of people assume it's a simulation within a simulation as soon as they break through the glass in the opening but they still try to save people where they can and if they don't, then at the end they get given another opportunity, this time reassured that it's real and lives are actually at stake. it's asking you the same question the game has asked you with every choice so far and this time with actual consequences because this is the last decision you make in the game, it's the culmination of your entire experience. also the way Alex has set up the whole experiment tells us so much about his character like he's depicted himself as the bad guy in the story very clearly and he's even portrayed Talos 1 as a nightmare scenario and where the huge alpha eventually comes and kills everyone and like if the Talos 1 incident was anything like what we experienced, them escaping is what could have unleashed Typhons onto earth and caused what we see today. but we don't know if Talos 1 was like that or if it was even worse, Alex clearly managed to escape given his position of power, but what about the hundreds of crew working there? hell, Alex literally otherizes people in the simulation itself where he sees Russian prisoners as less than human and deems them worthy of being experimented on bc clearly nobody cares about them and they're expendable. and were all the characters we meet at the end actually people on Talos who uploaded their consciousness to their operators like Morgan did with October, December and January? was the only way they could escape the station by not being biomatter: something the Typhon clearly want? are they less than human because their consciousness is no longer attached to their body now? but also like the arrival of Dahl is literally asking you if you're willing to set aside your differences to work with Alex!! like will you unite to fight a common enemy or will you kill both enemies or will you just get the obstacles out of your way to your goals? I mean basically every choice in the whole game is self-reflexive and about the themes and a comment on both the game itself and games as a whole like it's extremely well done. 2:07:14 except you couldn't really sell that given the mental health implications. That was a marketing department decision. It just brings up images of electroshock therapy and no marketing department worth its salt would touch that. fun video tho!

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